was also named first-team all-pro by the Chicago Tribune in 1926, which chose their all-pro team with players from both the NFL and AFL. In Slater’s five seasons with the Rock Island Independents, he played all sixty minutes of every game in which he appeared. Chicago Cardinals (1926-1931) Duke Slater signed a contract with the NFL’s Chicago Cardinals near the end of the 1926 season and appeared in their final two games that season. By signing with the Chicago (now Arizona) Cardinals in 1926, Slater became the first African-American to play for a current NFL franchise. At Slater’s urging, the Chicago Cardinals brought in Harold Bradley Sr. to play guard alongside him in 1928, making Bradley the second black lineman in NFL history. However, Bradley’s NFL career lasted just two games. With the exception of those two games by Bradley, Duke Slater was the only African-American in the NFL from 1927-1929. Slater’s streak of five straight all-pro appearances was broken in 1928, when the Cardinals played just a six-game schedule; after the season, Cardinals owner Chris O'Brien sold the team to Chicago physician Dr. David Jones. Jones purged the Cardinals roster in 1929, bringing back just four players from the previous season, but Slater – once again the only black player in the NFL – was one of four Cardinals to return. Star fullback Ernie Nevers joined the Cardinals in 1929. On November 28, 1929, Nevers set an NFL record by scoring all 40 points in the Cardinals’ 40-6 win over their intra-city rivals, the Chicago Bears. Nevers’ mark of 40 points in a single game is the oldest untied individual record in the NFL’s record books, having stood since 1929. Duke Slater played all sixty minutes in that game, the only Cardinal lineman to do so. The Chicago Herald-Examiner reported, “Duke Slater, the veteran colored tackle, seemed the dominant figure in that forward wall which had the Bear front wobbly. It was Slater who opened the holes for Nevers when a touchdown was in the making.” Bears head coach and owner George Halas later said, “I can’t say too much about Duke Slater as a football player and as a gentleman. In the old Cardinal-Bears games, I learned it was absolutely useless to run against Slater’s side of the Cardinal line. They talked about Fordham’s famous Seven Blocks of Granite in the mid-1930s and what a line that was.